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Space shuttle Atlantis with seven astronauts including the “made famous by Indian media” Sunita Williams landed safely at the Edwards Air Force Base, California today 0119 hrs (IST).

Well I don’t have a problem per say with Sunita Williams. She has reached some amazing milestones including the honours for longest stay in Space. My problem is with the fact that media claims her to be an Indian, and then running SMS campaigns for her safe landing. What about the other six on board, aren’t they also entitled to our good wishes. The bigger problem is when they claim her to be India’s daughter, when her nationality is American and also her birth place being Euclid, Ohio, USA. So can somebody explain how a person born and brought up in America with an American Passport be an Indian Property. Another thing being her father stating that “Sunita is India’s Daughter.” I just have one thing to say, how can a person who ditched his Indian passport in favour of an American Passport, dedicate his American daughter to India.

When will our media stop claiming people who are not Indians to be Indians and concentrate on much more important stuff. People like Bobby Jindal, Sunita Williams, Kalpana Chawla all have some ancestral roots to India and nothing else. What have they given to the Indian society other than confirming the facts that you won’t make it big in India, go abroad.

People like Lakshmi N. Mittal are much better who at least haven’t given up their Indian Nationality (its a different fact that he enjoys huge tax benefits under UK’s domicile tax policy).

I hope our media stops giving such people useless attention, and give me news that actually makes a difference to my life.

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Hurray!!! My exams are finally over. Well they actually got over on Thursday itself, and so this post is 3 days late.

Anyways the exams were great and as far as I am concerned they were pretty easy. After the exam got over, we went to Juhu Beach and had a blast, then got completely drenched in the first monsoon showers, which I was very much looking forward to since that day began. I never really had so much fun after the end of my exams.

I then spent the whole of Friday sleeping and on Saturday, I went to meet my good buddy Amit, from my engineering days.

As for today, I am just eagerly waiting for the US F1 GP to start and see how the Lewis Hamilton & Fernando Alonso drama unfolds.

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My friend Aman has written an excellent guide of how to download stuff using the latest in P2P i.e. torrents. Here are some of the important parts of the guide. The link to the article is at the end of the post.

Basics:
Firstly get a good client such as µtorrent or Azureus(Java), BitComet(C++) .Other Clients are not recommended!

The torrent file is not the file you aim to download, but a small file containing information where the bits of files are are located and information of trackers. Bittorrent isn’t linear though, it randomly sends and receives pieces from random users connected via the same torrent file.

Terminology:

Leecher: That’s the guys that don’t have the complete file.

Seeder: Those that now have the entire file, 100%, and therefore only function to upload to those that haven’t got the whole thing yet.

Peers: All users connected to the same torrent. The more peers, the greater the speeds, providing there are enough seeders.

Tracker: The centre when you start up the torrent. In short – it connects you to other users and is also the thing that sends you messages to your client.

How to download:
Head over to your favourite Bit torrent website which mind you don’t host files but simply host the .torrent file.When you find a torrent file online, you download it to your computer. Its recommended to keep the actual .torrent-file on your hard disk, in case you need to restart it. Now open the .torrent file in your bit torrent client, and tell it the place you want to store it. It starts download the minute the tracker has picked up on you being amongst the peers. Most tracker needs AT LEAST a few minutes to pick up, so leave it alone for a while.